Sunday, January 17, 2010

Unfortunately there is not a simple command in Linux to find the largest files and/or directories. However, combining the following three commands (using pipes) can help you locate the largest files/directories on your file system:

du - Estimate file space usage

sort - Sort lines of text files or given input data

head - Output the first part of files i.e. to display the n largest files/directories

In Terminal (command prompt) enter the following to list the top 10 largest files/directories:

sudo du -a / | sort -n -r | head -n 10

Of course this can be used on various directories as well, like usr or var: